


Contact

by earthmylikeness



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 18:46:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5795755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earthmylikeness/pseuds/earthmylikeness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Because what could Finn do but live through it? Live in the remains of his own shipwrecked mind, his badly-crossed wires. Imagine Poe’s perpetually bitten mouth on him - his wide, calloused hands on his bare chest, pulling him down and down whenever he so much as closes his eyes</i>
</p><p>Finn has a delayed reaction to surviving the crash.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Contact

 

 

 

**Nature is unsentimental.**

**Death is built in.**

 

From  _Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search For Who We Are_

 

* * *

 

 

Finn spends his waking hours like a sunless plant. A loose wreck of limbs on white sheets, the skin at his back knitting together in jump-speed, like dying in reverse. Finn dreams constantly and misses the stars.

Finn sleeps and sees ships falling up, pulled into the black sky like tar. Finn dreams of bent bridges and snowstorms. Blood red light piercing through the sky like a scar.

It takes time, they told him. Regenerating vertebral body is a lot more complex than a rib or a couple fingers - the consistency is complex, must be built not formed, like coral. It’s a matter of weeks.

Finn doesn’t think he can take weeks. Weeks of these metal walls, the humming machines, and medics with pinched brows who should be tending to much more important matters than his idiot wounds.

Finn doesn’t like what they’re giving him, painless through the tubes directly into his skin. It soothes his senses and puts lead on his eyelids. He closes his eyes and keeps seeing Slip falling like a tree, face-first into the sand. 2115 losing grip on his gun, his voice in Finn’s ear yelling in childlike agony for his mother, a mother he barely remembers. 

Finn should have been one of them. Finn’s no hero worthy of a second chance, doesn’t fear death any less. That would be Rey. Or-

“Pilot, the patient is resting,” someone says in alarm, BB-8’s dismissive whistle pulling Finn from under a shallow wave.

“They told me he’s awake,” a fervent voice ping pongs down the hallway and if Finn had a working spine he might’ve snapped it again, jerking up to see. He hasn’t heard a familiar voice in what feels like months, drifting in and out of frequency from an island of morphine.

“Finn, buddy.” Poe looks so good for Finn’s weak, stinging eyes it’s almost mean. He is clean-faced with relief, freshly singed flight suit trailing off his arm in a hurry, like he’d just come off the wing and threw water on his face. It might be wishful thinking.

“Poe Dameron,” Finn says reverently, embarrassing, his voice shot half to hell. He realizes he might’ve been repeating the name in his head over the past week, the words forming naturally like a next breath. 

Poe slows his approach, BB-8 clunking into his heel, scanning Finn from top to bottom.  Finn becomes hazily self-conscious, hopes he doesn’t look as useless as he feels. Though he knows he must; dark-circled and desperate, laid out like a sandbag.

“You look better,” Poe reassures. Finn sighs, breath catching like a fool. The idea that this might not be the first time Poe came to see him flares in his collapsed chest brighter than is probably okay.

“How are you,” Finn implores through a scratchy pipe, wants to grab Poe’s arm, pull him in chest-to-chest hard enough to hurt. Pat his shoulder like Poe had once done, ages ago, when he let him keep the jacket. His goddamn jacket - once perfect, now ruined. 

“Were you flying?” Finn says whatever nonsense that comes to mind, like Poe might leave if he stops. Finn figures he’s a weird person on his best day, trusts Poe to understand. “Where’d you go?”

“Rescue mission,” Poe says, eyes unmoving, jittery like he maybe wants to put his hands on something. Finn wishes he’d sit down. Wishes, dazedly, that he’d take off his battered suit. “We’ve put them off too long, focused all our resources on the Starkiller.” 

Poe rubs his soot-covered hands together instead, then on his pants, looking around - as if now realizing where he was. He glances apologetically at Finn’s medic. “There wasn’t much left: 200 dead, 75 wounded on Takodana, just four Passenger Brigs found stranded in the Hosnian System-”

Poe stops and meets his eyes, softens on contact. “You shouldn’t be hearing this.”

Finn shakes his head, blinking rapidly at the staggering count. Finn eyes the dark sleeve trailing around Poe’s waist, brown and matted, “Are you hurt?”

“Me? No,” Poe looks incredulous, handsome brows warping like Finn said something insane. Poe takes the remaining step the rest of the way to Finn’s bed. “No, no I’m fine.”

Finn coughs out a laugh, shuts his eyes, having to look up at Poe a real strain on his weak neck and weaker heart. He feels Poe move closer, put a hand on Finn’s shoulder, grounding. Finn revels in it, misses the feel of it like he’s already asleep.

“How’s the General?” Finn says, difficult, rung out of him like he didn’t mean to say it. 

He’s been going crazy ever since he came to, recalling the events on the Starkiller Base like a previous life. One he must pay for in this one.

Finn’s dreams are likely fueled by the guilt; his failure to save the General’s husband and his son. The fury and indignance that welled up in Finn’s chest as he slung the saber at Kylo Ren, again and again. 

The misplaced, carelessly executed revenge on the life Finn never got to have, the family that was taken from him. The back of Finn’s neck blurs and aches, a reminder of his arrogance.

When General Organa came to see him the first time, Finn had feigned sleep like a coward. 

The second time she had called his bluff, held his hand until the shaking stopped.

Poe’s grip tightens, “She’s the same as ever. She just flew back with the rescue teams, she’s headed to the relocated Senate HQ tomorrow.”

“And Rey,” Finn says, not quite a question.

Finn figures it has already happened, the inevitability of Rey being meant for far greater things than what was within an ex-stormtrooper’s range of the galaxy. The range of a small, thoughtless boy grasping at the immediate desire to flee, to escape the magnitude of what’s been lost, and what still could be. There were bigger plans for Rey.

Besides, Rey was always going to be fine, whether Finn was there or not. Finn was a different matter.

She has left to find Luke Skywalker, Poe tells him, and Finn nods at once. Resists a pang of hurt he doesn’t deserve to feel. He clenches his hand, wants to punch walls - knows he’s just broken parts left behind in the crash.

Poe shakes Finn a little, thumb like a brand on Finn’s collarbone, hushed voice holding fast to his consciousness before it’s pulled listlessly under again.

“It hurts to see you like this, Finn.”

Finn dreams about Poe fitfully. The two of them tied to an open engine careening through a pink sky, alight like a star. Poe yelling over the deafening screeches of metal and fire: _“It’s okay, I’m fine,”_ as he straps the last parachute to Finn’s chest with bloody hands. 

Finn is screaming _‘No,’_ and _‘Don’t leave me’,_ but nothing comes out, voice swallowed up in the vacuum.

Finn files that off as Not Normal, but again, even on his best day.

Finn gets discharged from the hospital three weeks later with a back brace and crutches, feels and probably looks like the 3P0 protocol droid, hobbling about at full height. It reminds him of training from when he was much younger, too young to remember. Learning to stand straight. Finn wants to burn the thing if he could only take it off on his own.

Finn is assigned 6 hours a week of psychotherapy, a much kinder 30 hours of physical therapy. Finn asks for more, but gets a negative from the General herself. 

“You take care of your injury, or you’ll answer to me, understand?” and Finn had nodded soundlessly, succumbed to her iron will.

His physical therapist is a Resistance soldier called Zilo who is on pregnancy leave, grounded 6 months in. Stationed at a recently empty hangar - now acting med-bay/rehabilitation clinic, Finn is currently her only charge and she happily drags him through the ground. Finn is left aching and pale-faced post work-out, more than he’s ever been on either side of an intergalactic war.

His psychotherapist is a droid.

“The ship crashes and I wake up,” Finn says to what is assumably the anterior, feeling crazy, “Is there meaning to that, you think? That he dies and I live?”

“There is only meaning that you make,” MEDPY-03 tells him, spinning its oculus in a heartless sort of way.

Finn has already told the very boring story of his life on Starkiller on multiple records; the childhood training, the fears they cultivated in him and the others. The groundless righteousness.

Finn can’t talk about the lives lost on that base, the people who he grew up with, who, like him, had little choice. Finn never had a family, but he lived on that weapon, and that had to count for something.

He doesn’t want to talk about Rey, a stubbornness akin to hers growing in him like weeds. Rey cried for him, they said. Finn feels mourned over.

He’ll talk about Poe.

“I think it’s doing something weird to me, these dreams,” Finn says, “Like I don’t believe he actually made it out of the crash.”

“And how do you feel when you see Officer Dameron?” MEDPY asks.

“Guilty,” Finn says, then frowns. “No, like, like I’ve missed him. I miss him. I think he goes on missions, a lot.”

Finn thinks that’s not quite right, didn’t really answer the question. “I feel all hot, and like I should go running.”

Finn considers Poe. A once enemy, now friend. His savior, and his victim too. The first person to ever give him a gift, in his memory. The first person to remark on his looks.

‘It suits you,’ he’d said with a kind of regard you’d reserve for a very loved one. Someone you’ve cared about for years, or at least Finn could imagine. 

Poe had called him good.

Finn cannot for the life of him shake that moment, the tiny memory like cool glass against the wall of his mind, waking him up like a drill every time. It’s probably not a drill.

“You’re not in rest-mode when I’m talking, are you?” Finn says, leaning in suspiciously.

“No, that’s just my face,” MEDPY hums, printing out a roll of numbers from a hole in its side.

Physio is a lot less arduous, despite leaving Finn drowning at the end of every session, gasping for air and leaning on a pipe for balance. At the least when Zilo tells him he’s improving Finn can tell when she’s lying.

BB-8 comes and finds him sometimes and keeps him company as Finn learns how to walk again, then run again. Put his boots on again. 

Finn holds up his side of the one-sided conversation, asks BB-8 questions he doesn’t really want to know the answer to, like: ‘how many crunches was that’, and ‘does Buford have a problem with me,’ and ‘how is Poe doing”.

“You speak binary?”

Finn spins around from his stretching one day and finds Poe leaned against the door, like that old dream. Jacketless and hair a dark, damp curl and pushed back like he’s been flying. 

Poe is over here in a second, embraces him hard, his laugh ringing like a drum through Finn’s entire body. 

“How are ya, buddy,” Poe lets him go, raises his hand as if to touch his head, doesn’t.

Finn pulls back, Poe’s face too close and overlapping with a most recent fantasy he’s suffered the other night.

 _“Stay back,”_ Poe had told him, wide-eyed, disappearing into the white forest as Finn lay buried in the snow, paralyzed, helpless in knowing Poe will not return.

Finn had to visit the infirmary next day from waking violently in his bunk and pulling out half his stitches. Supremely dumb.

Poe widens his eyes at Finn’s flinch and steps away, apologetic and kind of self-condemning — and Finn regrets the move.

“I’m sorry, Finn,” he says, hands at his waist. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” Finn says quickly, getting his bearings. Finn’s fine, just hot. “Where have you been?”

“Scouting. For the heart. We got to the Bespin system before we lost the track. The Starkiller’s fall has made a difference, a lot more docks have opened up to us.” Poe says with somewhat diminished joy, given every other outcome of the particular event. Poe has lost friends- family, Finn knows.

“People are keener to help the Resistance.” Poe says, looking down at his friend, “I was wondering where BB-8 was going off to. Should’ve known he’d come looking for you.”

“I can’t understand it, I doubt that I’m any good company.” Finn says, nudging it with his foot. A gleeful whistle returns.

“BB-8 is a _very_ discerning companion.” Poe says pointedly. Finn meets his eyes and watches his grin widen, blinding. He gives it away like Finn has every right to it — it makes Finn swallow hard, brimming. 

Finn follows Poe to work. It’s technically voluntary.

Poe Dameron spends his days on the ground taking care of Black One, commanding the soldiers in a line, and trailing the security teams asking, demanding better ways. Finn spends his off-hours hobbled, following Poe’s voice down hallways, around corners.

The front-line pilots are stationed at Waw, an East-facing hangar at the edge of the canopy of woods. The holo-table that holds down the middle of the hall is beat-up and put together with parts from different eras. The round insignia of the resistance blinks in and out intermittently, suspended in the air like a beacon.

Finn crutches by empty starfighter stations, their tables covered in black cloth and flowers, and resolutely does not look.

Poe is at his station charging his X-Wing and cleaning the engine. Poe sheds his clothes as the day ages, comes back from the lab with stained cheeks, hands full with recovered signals, tracks left behind by the fleeing fleets. Every day closer to the source, the masterminds behind the destruction.

Finn sits around and watches most of the time, doped up and paranoid. Thinks every lead is a trap, leg bouncing. Every breakthrough the Resistance makes in their search for the First Order starring in his next nightmare.

When Poe isn’t flying out or in the war room with the General, he’s talking missions with the remaining members of the squad leaders: Karé Kun, Gulch, MI70, Vober Dand.

Poe’s squadron regards Finn with a kind of awe-inspired tenderness, no doubt regaled with Poe’s stories and general myths around Starkiller base. 

They also rib him constantly  for his general lack of knowledge about anything outside of the Unknown Regions, like they’ve known each other for ages. It would bother Finn if he didn’t like them all so much. 

He likes Kun, especially - she has a discerning look like she could read your mind, but ultimately couldn’t give a borc’s ass about it. It strangely calms Finn.

“Heard you pulled out our Dameron from the Starkiller,” Kun tells him pulling up a chair, as Finn’s sitting boneless at Poe’s station waiting to get dinner — exhausted by, like, 40 minutes on treadmills.

Finn shakes his head adamantly, “I didn’t. He pulled me out.”

“Not how he tells it,” Kun says, “You finished his mission.” Finn doesn’t reply because he didn’t mean to, really. He only helped.

“I can’t believe how he gets out of these situations,” Kun huffs, looking over at Poe and the group of new Resistance recruits they’ve rescued, out at the bay, standing by the line of fighters. Poe is shaking every hand, a pull like gravity around him. “They seem impossible.”

Finn nearly says out loud, _He almost died,_ ready to tear out of him like air he’s been holding. Like it’s the Space Slug in the room no one would fucking acknowledge. It’s a terrible thing to say. 

Instead he shrugs, shaky. “Hell of a pilot.”

“Sure is,” Kun says, eyeing him worriedly. Finn squints into the glare of light flashing off of the starships. Tries to make Poe out again from the sea of orange.

Over the course of a week Finn becomes saturated by Poe Dameron, tracing his steps like some kind of taken shadow. He lives off Poe’s light like a wilted flower, breathes deep again, starts using his hands more.

Poe gives him his mother’s books of old maps, holopads with his own scratch notes on uncharted Western rims. Star systems Finn’s only ever heard about in rumor, and he devours them all in one sitting.

Poe throws nuts at him from across the room, abandoned, and Finn ignores him, squinting open-mouthed at the famed tracks of century-old heroes, painted in gold. He catches a few with his mouth to Poe’s crowing delight.

Finn turns around and Poe’s there under the wheel, sleeveless and sanded along the edges. He looks up and sees Poe standing on top of his ship, his helmet under his arm, waving him over, and Finn loses ground just like that.

There’s Poe on his back in the little cot at his station, miles asleep. Poe stretching huge before a flight, the shoulder blades pushing out, his whole body folded over like a wing.

Poe is telling jokes and watching for Finn to snort out his drink, run to the bathroom in tears. Poe is slapping his back whenever Finn cracks one too.

Finn drinks it in like he’ll run out. The precise, crooked way that Poe smiles when Finn surprises him; the wide-legged, nailed-down way he stands at attention - like a sculpture. Unaltered by the storm. 

The furious, tempestuous change of his face in the fraction of a beat, the calm of his eyes when watching for something to appear in the horizon.

Poe sometimes just looks, eyes him carefully, bites his bottom lip — and Finn thinks he must be doing that unconsciously, he can’t know what it does.

Finn’s defenseless, wearing nothing but a ragged gym shirt and body gloves for armor. He curls a finger at his collar and pulls, restless and heated even as he’s sitting. Finn feels it take over him like a fleet that fills the sky, fog pouring over a hill.

“What do you enjoy, Finn?” Poe asks him, and Finn frankly has nothing for him.

Poe introduces him to new foods, new drinks. It’s lightyears better than the protein shakes and the meat pie sludge of varied consistency he’d grown accustomed to on the base.

It’s sensory overdose at first, every taste deafening. Poe ducks his head and peers in, watching his animated reactions, thrilled.

Finn is taken to the Flangth meal and Baked Cushnips. Vober Dand throws him a ripe Galma as he passes him at his work-out once or twice, and though Finn is unused to fruit he eats it anyway, kind of scared of that man still.

They go to the pub and Poe eyebrows at him in the dim, dusty light, hand warm at his back. Kun orders drinks off-list, starts him on Matellian Cider, Brewglass. Finn ends the night bleary-eyed and leaning heavy on Poe’s shoulder, spewing nonsense, empty shots of Jet juice in an orderly line like stormtroopers on a plank. 

Gulch pinches his nose for him and pours something called Krilliz down his throat and that nearly does it. Finn cannot fathom that that’s a real taste.

Poe’s leg is a line of heat against Finn’s thigh all night, his hands clasped on the table and elbow like the blunt edge of a knife against Finn’s ribs. Poe is warm and buzzed, red reaching down under the collar of his shirt. 

Poe tilts his head to the side, pouring into Finn’s tunnel-vision like a glass of water, teasing him. Poe calls him personable, tells him he can hold his own. Finn blows air and says, ‘Of course I can,’ just to see him laugh, his face opening up, crinkling.

That might’ve been the switch, Finn will tell MEDPY later. A gallon of engine-room liquor in his system with just the simple biological proximity of Poe, being there, to humor his inebriated drivel — it put him on this, another level. Far below the one he started on, and one from which Finn may not ever recover.

Finn suffers his first hangover that lasts the following 48 hours. A layer has been pulled back, exposing his inner trepidations — his weakest animal manifested into being, recoiling in the daylight.

Poe, whether intentionally or not, is unsympathetic to this.

Tripled in volume and presence by Finn’s raging headache, Poe all but carries Finn around, pulling him into the mess hall by the scruff of his neck. His warm hands liberal at his waist, his sides - asking him, breathless, ‘Alright, buddy?’ as if Finn could rightly answer.

It’s an assault, is what it is. A steadfast attack on an unguarded front. Finn really has to do something about it, if only he could plan beyond the immediate press of Poe’s weight on him, his pink tongue on the rim of the glass like a euphemism.

Finn retires to his co-op every night filled to the brim with Poe’s eyes, his warm smiles and laughter ringing in his head.

Finn lies there and covers his face with his arm in palpable pain. He gets hard so easy nowadays, puts a hand on himself but can’t bring himself to do much more, afraid he’ll never be able to meet Poe’s eyes again. 

Finn muffles his noise in his pillow, gasps at the cold of his own hand on his thundering chest, drifting up. Finn feels wretched, like the lowest kind of being, head pounding as if in condemnation.

“He’s here, you gotta get used to it,” he tells the roof of his bunk.

He doesn’t, follows his friend around like a lost dog. Watches him at his station as he tears away the side of his fighter with his bare arms, peeling off the top of his suit to properly assess the damage.

“You still hung over, Finn?” Kun asks him as she passes, smug, catching him at his open-mouthed staring. Finn shakes his head, shifts his focus back on the fascinating armaments report he’s holding.

“For peacekeepers, Mandalorians sure shoot first and ask questions later,” Poe huffs, rubbing his face on his shoulder with his dirty hands stretched out. His undershirt is damp along the collar, pulling out of his waistband in the stretch. Finn gives up reading.

Finn watches instead Poe curling over to pick up the debulliator or whatever, stares openly as he solders stuff. Stares at the slim lines of Poe’s ribs and the reveal of his hipbone where the shirt has ridden up. Finn breathes carefully, sits up, hand a fist on his thigh like a child told to sit still.

Poe in half-light — the setting sun cutting through the hangar doors — sweating and kind of annoyed, frowning. Poe pulls out some debris from the hull and there are sparks, lighting up the floor pink and yellow.

Finn thinks it’s patently unfair. That this was happening to him now, while everyone else has had their whole life to feel this way, to get over it. Finn was just starting.

“Right, Finn?” Poe says, and Finn was definitely not paying attention, hard from just _looking_ at Poe Dameron.

“I’ve got to go.” Finn grabs his duffel, his jacket. “Got a, thing, gotta talk to my,” Finn stumbles, puts his finger to his ear like a habit, “therapist.”

“Finn?” Poe isn’t sold, goes immediately from amused to worried. There’s a smudge of black on the side of his perfect, worried head and Finn needs to go.

“I’ll see you later,” Finn says and gets the hell out of there, astounded.

Finn would like to believe that anyone would be so affected by Poe Dameron — it seems an inevitability, a part of the human condition. But Poe is Finn’s friend. A hero. It’s wrong that he should want him in any other way than that. Must be.

Because spending time with a friend-hero shouldn’t be this bad for him. It shouldn’t feel like his bones shifting off-lane, settling crooked and changing him irretrievably out of shape. It shouldn’t feel like trespass.

“Perhaps you should tell him about your affliction,” MEDPY suggests, “It can only ease your mind.”

“When can I stop coming?” Finn lifts his head from his hands, pleading. It’s the last thing he wants to do while he trudges through his days at the height of his sexual awakening - think long and hard about the precise ways in which he’s fucked up.

“You’re not filling half your hours, Finn,” MEDPY hums, put upon. “C-3P0 comes here more often than you.”

“This stuff’s private,” Finn says, probably missing the point. “I- I shouldn’t be thinking this way about anyone, let alone Poe who-. Who’s _Poe_.”

“Do you think I will judge you?” MEDPY says, “I’m a droid, soldier, I inherently consider sex to be illogical.”

Finn scrunches his face, in agony. “When?”

“When you make peace with your dreams.”

Finn doesn’t do that either, continues to wake most nights keeled over in cold sweat. In every disturbing scene someone takes the fall for him, and most often it’s the subject of said sexual awakening, who occupies his mind more than enough in waking.

“You’re still living on that base,” Poe tells him one day.

“What,” Finn jumps. Wonders fiercely, _how could you know._

“I can see it,” Poe says, rueful, fiddles with his gloves. “You’re not sleeping well.”

Finn doesn’t know how he could possibly explain. _‘I’m having these fatalistic dreams in which you die in my stead and I think it’s making me attracted to you.’_ Finn would rather defect again and go live on Jakku. 

It feels like the worst kind of post-trauma doubled by being emotionally half his age, Finn wishes he could surgically remove the part of his brain responsible.

“I’m okay,” Finn lies, and Poe chews on the inside of his mouth, staring at him for whole minutes. Finn blushes under the look.

He figures it’s the military thing. Finn has spent his formative years in a tin can with thousands of other stolen children who were trained to pillage and kill. Finn was _raised_ on violence, it’s probably natural that it also feels like love.

“You are not what they put you through,” Poe tells him, unwavering. “You are the one who brought us home.”

Finn understands why it had to be Poe Dameron. He accepts this fate in a distant sort of way. Finn remembers his first impression of Poe was nothing short of traumatizing, mixed in with adrenaline and heartbreak, and therefore reasonably melodramatic.

Finn had returned to the starship half out of his mind from the massacre on Tuanul, the need to get out sharp like a blade against his throat. 

He was pushed back in line and there he caught the sight of him between the troopers’ heads — the pilot who killed Slip. He was bound and fighting it, a stupid glow around him and fucking loud, blood in his mouth. 

Phasma struck him and he fell immediately to his knees, painting the floor of the ship. Finn’s legs had buckled in sympathy.

Finn was drawn to him like a caught satellite, took 2380’s shift so he can guard the pilot’s cell. Finn stood there all night and heard the pilot’s screams, willing them to stop. Wishing it wouldn’t kill the glow. 

 _‘Why would he help you,’_ Finn had told himself. _‘Your side murdered an entire village.’_ Will murder whole worlds.

Poe did, and Finn forgot they were enemies the entire time, giddy with the thrill of escaping his hellish circumstance and Poe’s captor. They were so in tandem it threw Finn off completely, freaked him out enough that he accidentally did some good in the whole endeavor. 

Poe had looked at him in wonder, backlit by the fireworks, and Finn had felt invincible. Finn was given a name that day.

Finn still feels sick at the memory of seeing the crashed fighter in the sand, a hole blown into the cockpit and nothing else. Finn doesn’t remember mourning Poe Dameron, just living through the trauma, like a piece of the wreckage.

When they met again, it felt impossible. Something shifted so deeply in Finn’s mind at the sight of Poe, whole and fine and happy to see him, like this world and the other one had switched places. He looked at him now and it felt like borrowed time. 

Because Finn rightly had no reason to have Poe in his life. To have swapped fire with him on those dunes, and to have pulled him, tired and bright with pain, out of that metal chair.

There was no reason for him to be so taken into Poe’s orbit, warmed by his relentless presence - but nothing worked as it’s supposed to in this universe.

And despite the bloody, incendiary connotation of their encounter Finn liked Poe, a lot. And Poe, like a dream, liked him back.

Poe asks him one day if he’d like to learn to fly, and it takes Finn by total surprise for whatever reason.

“Me?” Finn squints; Poe is difficult to make out in the warm navy overlay of the Ileenium sunset, as they sit perched on the wing of a cruiser. Poe has a knee up and a hand in his hair, a bottle loose in the other. It’s a very hard sight on Finn.

“Yeah, you,” Poe laughs, nudges him. “You’re good on the sights. It’s the same principle.”

“Yeah?” Finn strays, flattered. “I mean, I can’t. I don’t know how to fly a ship.”

“That’s the point, Finn,” Poe says, “I’ll teach you.”

Poe keeps his word — as soon as Finn graduates his crutches for good, he sits Finn in the Black One and straddles the shoulder of the seat, has him driving it around like a hoverbike. Poe gives instructions like Finn already knows everything, and he’s just jogging his memory.

“It’s just like shooting,” Poe says, over-simplifying. Finn barely registers, Poe’s arms around Finn’s to hold the wheel, voice low and sweet and too close at Finn’s ear, “Except you’re the bullet.”

“That’s a complete lie,” Finn says, shaken.

“Figurative,” Poe corrects.

Poe hums songs Finn’s never heard before, whistles along with BB-8 in his headset as Finn cruises the starfighter around the bay and complains. “I can’t do this,” Finn yells and gets soundly ignored.

Finn pulls the wrong switch as he’s trying to park and something starts beeping crazily, turning heads. Poe appears behind him in a blink, reaches in and presses a button just over Finn’s knee and Finn nearly passes out.

Finn watches Poe fly out with his squadron, hear him pass through the atmosphere like a blaster through a keyhole, blinks away the red-hot visions of burning engines and the blistering sand that swallows it whole.

Finn closes his eyes and sees corrupted maps, sending Poe and his squad to their doom. Finn imagines telling them not to go, and no one believing him, calling him a traitor.

Finn dreams of drowning and Poe’s hands on him hard against his sides and neck, Poe breathing air down his throat and pushing him up towards the surface. Finn wakes with his face wet — whether with tears or terror-sweat he can’t tell. Finn stops going to see MEDPY altogether.

His first flight out is at 1900. Poe preps him up for it, tells him it’s just like floating. It’s the best feeling he’ll ever experience in this life.

Finn remains skeptical. He doesn’t sleep the night before and barely eats all day. He gets accompanied to the hangar but walks on his own past the empty stations. He pulls himself up into the X-Wing, weak-kneed, smiles meekly back at Poe from the seat.

Finn checks all of the checks and receives the clear, and readies his engine, hearing nothing but the pounding in his chest. Floating is not the word. Spinning uncontrollably might be more like it.

“You ready, Finn?” Poe says in his ear.

The ship lifts off, the force of it traveling up his spine like a shock. He hovers, tests the boosters, pulls up. For a minute it’s all blue outside.

Finn remembers flying before. He sat in dark, windowless hallways with the other soldiers, waited in the perfect silence for the rumble of resistance against the hulls; the sound of the planet’s atmosphere refusing the ship’s entry, despite its gravity pulling them down. The conflict of falling.

Finn’s soaring up and up, there’s someone talking in his ear, telling him to come down maybe, to slow the burnout and change gears, he hears them like he’s gone under.

Finn remembers being on the Millennium Falcon. The ticket out, the luckiest ship he’d ever been on — it had taken him everywhere he’d needed to be. 

Finn remembers then, a tie-fighter. The judder of a blaster hit and the deafening sound of engine failure. Finn remembers the heat and the endless fall.

Finn’s mind shutters down, snaps to black - and he’s hearing the alarms in his ears again. He’s in his stormtrooper suit, and Poe in his jacket. He looks up and sees the sky spin, go from blue to gold, smoke trailing.

Finn’s hand slips, and the ship’s tipping — switching course abruptly like marbles on glass. 

“No, no,” Finn grabs it again but he’s already headed down. The ground coming up like a wall. No, he got out, Poe got out. 

_“Finn,” Poe screams from the pilot seat, “Hold on!”_

A blare of light like a nuclear explosion, and Finn yells, something tearing free in his throat, pulls up. The floor hits the ground, screeching to a terrible stop like a scar across the runway.

“Finn, Finn,” someone’s yelling through the ringing in his ear and all Finn can see is a crater behind his eyes. A ship on fire with no pilot. His hands are shaking, heart thundering still like he’s falling through the ground. 

Finn falls out of the ship and shies away from the sounds, the light. He rips his helmet off and drops it like a stone, runs for shelter.

Space is a terrible, unforgiving thing, he was taught. There is no distance from it, no wall to keep it out. It is only a matter of time before Finn will be taken by it too like everything else, and with no exception, Poe Dameron. No Resistance pilot is at its mercy, not even the best one.

And one day the engine will fail, blind faith will run its course and leave them stranded, and Finn will again have lost everything he knows.

Finn finds himself in the armory, among suits and blasters hanging on hooks. Finn wanders aimlessly, his breaths echoing too loud, blind and deaf — wants to stop seeing things at the end of the hall. Wants to stop here and stay a while.

“Finn, buddy,” Poe is saying, here, hands at his shoulders, “What is it?”

Finn wishes he was like Poe. Poe is grown-up, lives up there with fantastic concepts like faith and luck. Poe is fearless, unfathomably good - Finn wants to bask in it. Bury himself, breathe it in.

“I’m not cut out for this,” Finn says, and doesn’t think he means the flying.

Something flashes across Poe’s face, like abrupt guilt — and Finn hooks on to it, open-mouthed, disoriented to all hell.

“Don’t waste your time with me,” Finn says, anger spilling in. Poe must know that Finn can only take so much. “Don’t do this, just to make me feel-“

“I’m not,” Poe cuts in, fierce. He speaks lowly, but it rings like an orchestra in the room. “Please, Finn, you are-“

Poe stops like he can’t take it, strides to Finn in the span of a second. Finn is soon trapped, held by his shoulders and pressed against Poe’s rising chest, eyes wide and caught.

“Nothing, is spent, Finn. Nothing is more important than this: You are made for it.” Poe fixes his mouth at a determined slant, breathing heavy, eyes wandering over his face as if it’s crucial that he knows. Like it’s otherworldly that he doesn’t.

“Don’t be taken so easily by a day-long hurt.” Poe tells him, too bright like a low-flying star. “Don’t be intimidated by mere nightmares.”

Finn remembers the look on Rey’s face when he told her that he’s running. That he can’t take the chance, and that the fear of losing everything isn’t worth the fight. 

Finn remembers watching, just watching as they took her, not being able to follow. Feeling his heart give out, feeling like he won’t survive it.

Something comes unknotted in Finn’s chest by the call to action. He hasn’t listened to much of MEDPY’s suggestions, figures he’ll just take this one.

Finn holds his breath, eyes the scar on Poe’s cheek like it’s wronged him, like it’s his doing. Yes, he will try this one thing.

A week passes exactly like that one, apart from almost killing himself three seconds after lift-off, and the General clears Finn for duty again.

Finn has to visit MEDPY, and Finn tells them that he hasn’t stopped having bad dreams. He says he’s not really thinking about it much any more, and it’s not a lie.

Finn sits on the roof of the hangar in lieu of sleeping, looks up at the sea of lights and misses Rey. Wishes she was safe, wherever she was.

He watches the blue moon rise from the edge of the water, staining the sky, and thinks maybe, when he really knows how to pilot a ship, he’ll go see her.

Poe’s waiting for him at his station after hours, geared up. The hangar is empty, everyone else retired. Finn’s crooked steps echo in the hall along with BB-8’s greeting, as he approaches his ship.

Poe watches him solemnly as Finn puts on his gear, but quirks his lips at him when Finn looks up. “You ready?” Poe says.

“As I’ll ever be,” Finn tells him, pulls himself up into the seat. Doesn’t miss Poe’s full-on grin as he follows suit.

They decide it might help if Poe goes up there with him. Finn isn’t sure, it can’t be better for his psyche seeing both himself and the object of his paranoia dangling from great heights. 

But Poe tells him it’s easier if you have a point to follow with your eyes. It’s better to deal with the vast, unending black if you have a place to be, a target in your sights.

Poe lifts off first, shoots into the horizon like a dot. Finn pushes off too, boosts forward before he loses him.

“You alright?” Poe buzzes, and Finn nods. Says “Yeah,” realizing Poe won’t see it.

Finn holds his breath through it, watches Black One pull off from that line and head into the dark. Finn follows, shakes along with his ship as it fights through the atmosphere, wills himself not to budge.

Don’t be intimidated, Poe had said. Finn won’t let them.

And just like that he’s in the clearing.

Finn huffs out a laugh, looks down at his readings. All clear. He was outside. He was free to be anywhere.

Finn crows, dips down, searches for the little red lights. Poe’s pulling corners a hundred yards out, whizzing past him in the next second, and Finn follows, heart racing.

Poe pulls up abruptly and Finn flies past, does a barrel roll and picks up speed — Finn watches the sea of stars pan around, spirals down towards the planet using the secondary boosters, a trail of red following him.

“Did you see that,” Finn’s yelling, soaring through the vastness like a grain of sand in the wind.

“Yeah, I saw it,” Poe’s grinning in his ear, and Finn’s gone on it. Focuses on the drag of that voice, Finn’s heart beating in his ear and for a second, just a second, lets go.

Finn pitches forward, slowing the booster for a sharp groove along the soft, needling pull. He chases the marble until it’s square in his sights.

D’Qar is a green planet, its surface covered in forests and water, quite atypical of the Outer Rim. He looks at his new base, this little rock where he sleeps, where it never snows and the weather is temperate, and he fills his windshield with it. Frames it like he would a painting.

They fly for an hour, Finn getting quickly used to the zero-wind navigation. Poe does circles around Finn as he orbits the planet.

They pull into port and land safely, despite Poe’s last-minute maneuver during the re-entry that makes his stomach drop. Lose vision again.

Finn had been falling too quick, unable to pace the deceleration, so Poe had meant to merge their surface area in order to slow the descent. It worked, but he had been too close. Their wings had been basically overlapping.

“You’ve got a death wish,” Finn’s telling him, climbing down the fighter. His chest is still running warp speed, head dizzy from not getting enough air.

“You should trust me,” Poe suggests, completely unaffected.

He holds his breath at the sight of Poe jumping down from the cockpit, landing like a graceless cat.

“Easy, right?” Poe’s saying, straight-faced. “You were good.”

“Stop it,” Finn grins, heads for the armory, giddy with it.

It hadn’t been easy, but it was amazing for it. Finn had never felt better, being out there. It had felt like winning. Like he’d beat out his own mind in the fight.

Finn pulls off his helmet and taps it against his side, hands running. Watches, face numb, as Poe pulls his gloves off. Finn kind of wants to be over there, near Poe’s locker. 

Thinking is much easier when he has a place to be.

“Anyway, as you said. I pulled in too close at the last minute.” Poe clicks his tongue, hurt. He throws a look over his shoulder, eyebrow raised in challenge. “Should’ve cooled off on the boost.”

Finn stares at him for a solid second. “I feel like you’re laughing at me,” he says, towels his face before it gives everything away.

Poe shakes his head, serious, “Never. You’re beyond reproach in my books.”

“Oh, please.” Finn pulls off his jacket, down to his undershirt - always so hot like it’s the desert. “You think I’m a brat,” Finn accuses, “Think I’m no-good.”

“Search me,” Poe says, rough. And then, like a miracle, his eyes stick directly on his chest, his eyes, then his mouth - that order. And oh-

Oh.

“What,” Finn breathes. 

There should be more there, but Finn’s mind’s gone blank, his chest left shaking on its hinges. The air stills as it all settles into place like a god damn punchline, planets lining up for a window of clarity.

Poe’s eyes widening slightly, a hopeful crimp in his mouth. And that’s-

“That’s not fair,” Finn says, quite mad.

It’s not fair, because it’s taken Finn forever. And it’s five thousand percent Poe’s fault. Poe still has his jumpsuit on one arm, a smudge of dark on his throat — looking at Finn like it’s all he could do not to wrestle him into the wall, keep him there for hours.

“You, you-“ Finn starts, doesn’t finish, hands grasping at nothing. Feels himself flush, because he almost said _want me,_ and Finn doesn’t _know what that means-_

“Finn,” Poe shakes his head as if at a loss. As if he couldn’t help it. Finn can telegraph the skim of Poe’s eyes, quick down and up.

“No way,” Finn breathes. He had no idea. Has no idea.

But Poe _knew._ Poe has likely been here, and Finn has never, not even close - and here he was broken up about it for weeks, months even, like a second wound this crush had settled in.

Because what could Finn do but live through it? Live in the remains of his own shipwrecked mind, his badly-crossed wires. Imagine Poe’s slick, perpetually bitten mouth on him, his wide, calloused hands on his bare chest, pulling him down and down whenever he so much as closes his eyes, at the slightest touch-

Ache for him like a _terrible_ , awful friend and it was all - that was all _real._

“ _Oh_ ,” Finn says, betrayed. “Oh you-“

Poe shakes his head, undone, “I didn’t mean, any of it- Finn, I,“

And what does that mean? What’s Finn supposed to do with that? Finn could explode with indignant frustration.

Poe sees something in Finn’s face and pulls back like he’s been hit, turns to the door - and Finn’s hand is somehow at Poe’s arm, a loose grip. They both stare at it, thrown pretty badly.

Finn, in the light of this new day, with this new, terrifying idea that the basis for his unsound mind is not just of his own invention — finds that he is kind of done with running.

“Where are you going,” Finn huffs. Poe shakes his head, shuts his eyes for a second, like he wants Finn to know it’s taking everything he has.

“Don’t leave me here,” Finn says, worked up, embarrassing - and then Poe is right there, ducking his head and slotting his mouth careful, firmly, against his. 

Their noses brush, and Poe swallows once, pulls Finn’s lips between his - and it is the harshest thing, it is a storm in Finn’s head.

And Poe is off him in no time, looking cleanly surprised. He closes his mouth and licks his lips and Finn’s eyes are stuck there, riveted.

Poe kissed him and it feels like a green light. Like sunbeams off a starship. Finn’s hand is still on his arm but he’s barely holding on, Poe anchored to him now, held in his orbit.

“I’m not cut out for it,” Poe admits, unsure for the first time Finn’s ever known him. He raises his eyebrows, shrugs, “You make it impossible.”

Finn is thoughtless, moves as if by a tectonic force, falls forward and pushes his face against the side of Poe’s head. Nuzzles his cheek and breathes in and feels Poe shake.

“Finn,” Poe warns, hands up in surrender, hovering around Finn’s shoulders. He’s not touching him back and that’s crazy. It makes Finn swear, press his lips to his ear with a hand to his cheek, rough with evening stubble. He doesn’t know how this works. He just _wants_.

Finn pulls back, finally, breathing heavy, and Poe’s eyes are huge and white, his shoulder against the inside of Finn’s arm.

“Do that again,” Finn says and Poe does, like a dam breaking, an arm hooked around Finn’s neck and crashing against his mouth. Poe breathes out, careful so careful with Finn like he’ll bolt. Finn hangs on for dear life because it’s a near thing.

Both Poe’s hands on the sides of his face now and head tilted to meet his lips at a slant, pulling him in and in, like he’s been thinking about this forever, for lifetimes, which can’t be real.

“God, you’re hot,” Finn gusts between searing presses - making Poe laugh, rusty, face changing in phases this close-up. Finn considers the view a fair trade for his mortification, face heating like an active volcano. There is likely smoke coming out of his ears.

“Right back at you,” Poe rumbles against his throat, hand moving against Finn’s side reverently. Poe makes a noise in his throat and it’s a hundred ships taking off, all of the windows bursting open in Finn’s chest.

Finn looks up at the ceiling, wishes on every star he can name that he’ll never wake up from this. Poe breathing hard and raspy in his ear, moving against him like the sea, in wakes. Finn is harder than he’s ever been in his life and he’s gonna ruin this by being completely inexperienced and kinda traumatized — it’s probably a matter of time.

“I have nightmares about you,” Finn shudders, and that didn’t take very long.

“What,” Poe’s breathing, ringing like an aftermath in Finn’s head. And Finn stares at his eyes, blown dark and heading towards lost - bites his tongue hard enough to bleed.

Finn shuts his eyes, almost says _Never mind_ , but the likeliness of that working lives on a level even his own pessimism couldn’t reach. “Not- they _are_ about you but not. I have these dreams where you, you’re, you’re gone,” Finn spills out, cotton in his lungs.

Poe blinks, a sharp intake. Finn stares and stares, drinks it in like it’s the last time. Poe’s face is caught, half-lidded eyes searching his face. He is so beautiful Finn can barely bear it, he almost laughs.

“I thought you should know,” Finn finishes, lamely.

“Yes,” Poe nods, glances briefly at his hands holding Finn against the wall, considering, “I’m in love with you.”

Finn’s mind breaks, then, cleanly in two. He’s staring, eyes probably saucer-sized, pushes Poe back with all of his remaining strength, because-

“What,” he yelps, fairly. Poe lands against the other wall, hair a mess and flushed to his ears, his jumpsuit a hopeless wreck. And WHAT?

“I thought we were sharing secrets,” Poe shrugs, hands running against his sides. He looks to the door and back, something like fright in his eyes. Poe Dameron, who never wastes a shot, is shaking imperceptibly.

“Right,” Finn says finally, pushes his thumb against his forehead, running a mile a minute. There’s a lighthouse in his head that’s turned on, calling him towards the rocks.

Finn’s only just learned what Poe tastes like, it’s all happening too quickly and he’ll fuck it up-

Finn looks up, and Poe’s there, as ever. Scratched up a little but whole, a miracle. Finn flew a ship just a few minutes ago. He thinks if this is just another adrenaline-induced fantasy, the last resistance at the end of the line, he might as well give it all up. 

“Right,” Finn huffs, rubs his face ferociously, “I- That’s a given for me, I guess, then, right?” 

“What’s a given,” Poe’s saying, coming back over, mouth turned up in one corner in wonder. He is hard to look at, bright with hope.

“That-” Wasn’t it obvious? Finn thinks he’s never really been subtle about it, the feeling living huge on his sleeves, practically on the floor between them — it’s only ever been the biggest blindspot to himself. “that I’m in love with you. I love you.”

“Oh,” Poe says into his mouth, kissing him again and time blurs. Poe’s hands planted on either side of his head, arm framing his vision. Finn barely has a chance to think about if he’s doing it right this time, can barely think, swept up in the waves and rubbing up against Finn’s leg pushed between his like a teenager, overrun.

“I’m right here, Finn,” Poe breathes, too much, hands on Finn’s face and under his shirt at his back, climbing his ribs, “I’ll never leave.”

Finn’s not an idiot, but he’s learned to take what he can in this new world. Finn groans into Poe’s mouth and fists the collar of his suit, sees stars. Poe pulls him in, smiles against his lips like it’s true.

They head to Poe’s room after, jogging down the hallways red in the face, Poe messing up the door code like three times. Then it’s Finn and Poe standing bootless in the middle of Poe’s bedroom - making out again.

Finn can’t stop kissing him, a new obsession. Finn whimpers into Poe’s mouth as Poe pushes his hand under his belt, and he licks into Poe’s smug cut of teeth. Finn wants to keep touching, wants it to be good for Poe, whatever he wants.

What Poe wants is to straddle his chest.

Poe seats him on the bed and pulls his shirt off. Finn places his hands carefully on Poe’s waist and the back of his thigh, puts his mouth on the skin just under Poe’s chin.

Poe’s pulling off his suit and pushing Finn back onto the sheets, kneeling on top of him and kissing him blind.

Finn’s just chasing lips, hands around Poe’s shoulder blades, pulling him down and lifting his leg. It feels too good, nothing like he could ever have imagined. Finn kisses him like he’ll go crazy, bites his bottom lip and mouths along his jaw reverently, fingers at his throat and then “Ahh,” Finn’s moaning into Poe’s mouth, keening.

Finn’s frozen, eyes to the ceiling, unbelievably turned on — Finn gasps and Poe kisses him, his hand in Finn’s pants and moving.

“Poe,” Finn warns against Poe’s lips, just barely holding on. Poe’s shoulder pulls up, he curls his fingers around his dick and presses and Finn scrunches his eyes, embarrassed by the sounds he can’t keep in.

Poe’s moving down, and Finn’s hands drag from Poe’s back to his head. Finn follows him up, staring as Poe unzips him further to pull him out. Poe’s hair is falling over his eyes, his brows furrowed in concentration. Finn huffs out a shuddering breath at the sight and Poe meets his gaze.

“Like this?” Poe asks, twisting his wrist, watching him, moans along with Finn. It’s the greatest thing Finn has ever witnessed. Finn’s propped up by an elbow and losing it, keeps his eyes on Poe’s lips as he mouths at the tip, bares his teeth against the side.

Poe kisses the base, open-mouthed, and says, low, “Tell me, tell me how,” and Poe swallows him whole and Finn can’t because he’s gone.

“Uh, hah, Poe—“ Finn’s fisting the sheets with his head jerked back, fighting to see, to hear, to make sense of it. Finn shakes like the hull against the atmosphere as Poe moves like waves over him. Poe links his arm around Finn’s leg, tongues the underside of Finn’s dick and Finn’s dying - there isn’t any air.

Finn has never done this, never had anyone touch him before, like this. He never, could never have imagined it would be like that. Like an explosion waiting to happen in his chest, dizzy like ten shots of jet juice straight into his skin.

“Ah, Poe—“ and Finn doubles forward, fingers straggling at Poe’s crash of hair, whining pants pulled out of him in bursts. Finn can’t see past the feeling as he rides against the hold, surrounded by the heat of Poe’s mouth, and it’s—

Poe pulls off, eyes lidded and lips shining. Poe makes a little noise like it’s good, bites his lip, rolls up a little to take hold of Finn with his hand and starts pulling him off, firm and careful and rubbing against his hard chest — and Finn’s blown apart, mouth open.

Finn comes, white heat behind his eyes and a silent gasp, as he shudders through it. Finn’s twisting under Poe’s hold, seeing sparks, a living super nova — and he’s pulling in huge gulps, desperate for it. 

It feels infinite. Like it’ll never end, Finn will disappear with the feeling. Finn comes to with his hand in Poe’s hair, Poe nuzzling his leg. There’s come all over his chest but Finn’s fine with it. Finn is never getting up again.

Poe climbs up a little with a groan, his hard dick still in his briefs catching on Finn’s hand as he does, and Finn grabs at it in his stupor, clasps his other hand on Poe’s ass - god damn.

Poe’s moving against him, kissing his mouth through roaring breaths and Finn can only hold on, push back with a fraction of his strength, his chest rolling. His legs have lost all feeling as he scrambles to push up.

“Ah, ah— Finn- ha, fuck,” Poe’s raspy breath coming harsh against his temple and he’s rubbing himself on the crook of Finn’s leg, against the fold of his pants, his zipper still undone. Finn just holds on to Poe’s shaking arms by his head, tries to find his mouth again.

Poe comes with a gasp at Finn’s throat, caught off guard. He groans through it, rung out of him, teeth on the edge of Finn’s cheek leaving marks. 

“Ahn,” Poe moves with a final pulse against his body, kisses the side of Finn’s head.

Finn dazily realizes that that’s Poe, coming apart above him. And he blurs out momentarily, moans at the ceiling, too-loud. Finn’s dick hardening again just at the idea.

“Damn, Finn,” Poe says, breathless, blinking out of it. He’s flushed and pink-mouthed, a drop trailing down from his forehead, his hair sticking up on the top — and Finn’s all the way there now. 

“It’ll go away, just-“ Finn shuts his eyes, pushes Poe off him and up a bit.

“That’s ridiculous,” Poe laughs, weighing down, puts his hand on him again — and Finn covers his face, swears a lot.

It goes on through the night, until the sky starts to brighten. Afterwards they lie exhausted on top of the destroyed sheets and keep their hands on each other, a sustained contact. Finn’s falling asleep, wants the last thing he sees before he goes under to be Poe Dameron on his chest, arms spread and content.

“When you showed up at D’Qar — And I looked for you, Finn. BB-8’s signal got off Jakku but I never knew you did so we, looked.” Poe shifts closer, arm bent weird like a kid’s. There’s a hickey on his collarbone that he wouldn’t see unless there was a mirror.

Finn covers his eyes with his arm, trailing, the darkness pulling him under again. “You wouldn’t find me dead on Jakku,” Finn mutters, and then immediately regrets it.

He pulls his arm away to see Poe, a bit thrown. He looks down at his hands, swallowing- and Finn hates that. Finn pushes his head against his shoulder, sorry.

“Exactly,” Poe nods, “So we stopped searching. But then you showed up. Alive. And- and fit and standing, with BB-8. And it was like-”

That memory again, when Poe found him. When Poe saw Finn and saw that he was good. It’s crystal, suspended in the air and shining light on everything Finn can see.

“What was it like,” Finn says, awake now. Finn focuses on the loose curl of hair across Poe’s forehead, the line of red on his cheek like a refusal. A sign of warning against the very laws of nature.

“It was like hope,” Poe says. “You’d made it out and it was like nothing can really be impossible _,_ you know?”

Finn knows. There is just one truth in this world Finn understands with a clear-eyed certainty: the universe is not kind. The cosmos is an uncaring, unfeeling creature. There is no barrier between this world and the other, and nothing will spare them at the end of it when it comes. 

But Finn will take it by inches. Finn will get by on the width of a hair. He’ll live through it, out of the wreckage he’ll crawl on.

Finn feels Poe’s breaths even out, the arm across his chest rising and falling, and he considers his luck. Finn looks into the cut of dawn through the curtains, the light traveling millions of miles through the void and dust, past the clouds, to find its way into his eyes. 

Finn stares at it, unblinking, until he tears up. 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

**For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.**

 

From _Contact_ , Carl Sagan

 

 

 


End file.
